


The Cost of Being Alone

by avabot



Category: Death Note
Genre: M/M, mafia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 02:20:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2605025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avabot/pseuds/avabot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: Matt gets a call from an injured Mello. Their involvement with the mafia begins here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cost of Being Alone

**Author's Note:**

> All right well, this was first posted on tumblr but I decided to put it on here too bc why not. Just a warning: I know nothing about the mafia, and this fic is pretty much unedited. Sorry if you find any mistakes in the writing. Enjoy~

"It was an accident! Matt, I swear, It was an accident…I didn’t mean to do it…everything was just happening so fast—!"

“Mel, Mel, calm down, what’s going on?” Matt sat up in his bed, a blanket haphazardly thrown over his body. He leaned on his forearms while squinting at the clock on his bedside table, suppressing a groan at what he saw. One in the morning…the one time he managed to go to sleep early was the one time someone woke him up in the middle of the night.

“Wait a second, are you not at home?” He asked Mello, his brain, now clouded with sleep, took a few moments longer to understand what was going on.

“No, I,” Matt heard a shaky sigh as Mello’s voice grew smaller. “Matt, I think I just killed someone.”

“What?” Matt shot up out of bed, running a hand through his newly dyed hair. “Mello.” He said, only managing to keep calm because the situation seemed so unreal to him, and because he knew it wouldn’t help Mello to freak out. “What happened? Where are you, are you safe?” He paused, his voice growing quiet.

“…You got involved didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question, although the silence on the other end only proved to confirm his statement even further.   
“God damnit, Mel!” Matt slammed his hand down on the table next to him before releasing himself from the warmth of his tiny mattress. “You said you wouldn’t! You said you were done with them!”

“We needed the money, Matt! No ones looking after us anymore! Roger isn’t going to come to our rescue when we need it. We’re on our own now. I accepted that the second I walked out of there and,” a shaky breath. “I thought you did too.”

“We were doing fine on our own.”

“You know that’s a lie.”

Matt gave himself a few seconds to calm down before talking. An argument wouldn’t help anyone right now.

“What happened?” He asked, holding the phone to his ear as he threw on a pair of pants.

“I—I was pick pocketing and, shit, I don’t know, I guess I went into one of the areas where a lot of them hangout. I didn’t notice one of them was watching me. He came up to me. I got scared so I…started yelling shit at him. He told me he could help me make more money than what I had. Said there was a meeting in a couple hours and that I should come with him…”

“Shit, Mello,” Matt groaned as Mello’s voice grew smaller.

“I went to the damn meeting,” by now Matt had to strain his ears to understand what he was saying. “I went to the damn meeting, and it turns out, the police had infiltrated it.” A weak laugh reached Matt’s ears. “Just my luck right? Although I guess I ran out of luck the second I became an orphan.” He paused to take another shaky breath. Matt put him on speaker and turned the volume up so he could throw a shirt over his head. He felt the need to be doing something— _anything_ — as Mello talked to ease his own anxiety. “So of course they go through the typical ‘put your hands up’ bull which, of course, no one follows. I’ve never seen anything disintegrate into chaos that fast before. I thought the mafia was supposed to be organized crime.”

Matt paused what he was doing to give his phone an annoyed glance. Of course he’d try to make a fucking joke right now. Of course. He heard another shaky breath and almost felt a little bad at not responding to Mello’s attempt at easing the tension. Truth be told, he was more than a little pissed at his best friend right now. Matt knew that Mello had been leaning towards more illegal lines of work for a while now. He couldn’t exactly blame him—it did pay better than anything the two of them would make at this point—but Matt also knew that stuff like this never ended well. He had made this clear to the blond, even made him promise he wouldn’t get involved in that sort of shit but of-fucking-course the guy would go ahead and do it anyway. Mello continued talking.

“At that point it was every man for himself, so I did the rational thing and took the nearest gun I could find. That shit was just lying around on the floor…I guess some idiot dropped it while getting away.” At this point Matt had more than finished getting ready and had just realized that Mello still hadn’t told him where he was.

Mello didn’t speak again for a while. Every second that passed only served to make Matt more nervous.

“Mels, I’m sorry, but you really need to get to the point. Where are you? Are you hurt?” A gloved hand came up to fidget with his goggles.

“I got shot. Some bastard shot at me. I don’t even know if it was the police or some random git. All I knew was that it hurt a shitload and I was fucking hungry and I was fucking angry so I turned around and used to fucking gun and it fucking hit someone and I’m a fucking murderer now.”

Matt had tried talking over Mello with exclamations of “you’re hurt?!” And “Jesus, Mello, why wasn’t this the first thing you told me?” But he knew now that Mello had stopped really talking to him. Instead he was just babbling into an empty space with some vague understanding that there was someone on the other end that might be able to comprehend what he was going through. It wasn’t him talking to Matt anymore, it was him releasing a bout of emotion that Matt knew had been bottled up inside him for a long time now. 

“That guy might have had a family. He could have been a dad. Someone might have to go up to a little fucking kid and tell him that his dad doesn’t exist anymore. I just made a kid one half closer to being an orphan.” Words were mashing together into a jumbled incoherent mess. “ _I’m_  the orphan, _I_  should have just died instead—”

Matt was kicking at the furniture between shouts of “Mello what the fuck are you saying? Mello, listen to me! Tell me where the fuck you are!” But he might as well have been yelling at a brick fucking wall.

With a tightness in his throat, Matt forced his voice to calm, although it came out lower than he expected it to. “Mello, I need you to answer my damn questions, okay? Please.” His voice broke, but he continued talking.  
“Where are you shot?”

“Stomach.” He was surprised to get a coherent, short answer but decided to take advantage of it.

“Is it still bleeding?”

“Yes.”

“Are you safe?”

“I think so.” Matt felt some tension in his shoulders release at his answer.

“Is there something around you that you can use to stop the bleeding?”

“No.” And then in a quiet, broken voice not unlike that of a child, “There’s so much blood.”

“Okay, everything’s going to be okay, Mello. Just tell me where you are, I’ll come get you.”

Silence

“Mello?”

Matt felt like each second he waited brought him closer to cardiac arrest.  
“God fucking dammit, Mello if you don’t answer me I swear—”

“I think it’s best if you don’t find me.”

“What?”

“This was gonna happen sooner or later, might as well be now.”

“Mello don’t be stupid.” Matt warned.

“You’ll probably do better on your own. Or you could go back to Wammy’s. Roger’ll probably take you back.”

“Mello, please, tell me where you are, please. I’m begging you.”

The two were talking over each other now, neither quite listening to what the other was saying, only focused on getting their own point across.   
“I guess you’ll be second now. Good luck beating Near. He’s a piece of shit to deal with.”

“Don’t do this to me. I swear to God Mello I won’t forgive you—”

“Bye Matt. I’m really sorry but…at least someone knows it was an accident now.”

The line went dead.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Matt lifted his phone from where it sat and threw it as hard as he could. The useless device didn’t even break. Instead it bounced off the wall and landed on the floor with an unsatisfactory thud.

It didn’t take more than a minute for the hacker to act. It didn’t take too long to track down the location of his friends cellphone. A few seconds later he was in his truck, keys in the ignition, and peeling out of the driveway. Moments spent waiting were erased from his mind as they were happening. Getting from point A to point B didn’t matter, but what he would do after reaching did.

He found Mello slumped over in a discreet, narrow alleyway. The black leather of his top camouflaged easily with his surroundings but the yellow hair and white skin that was paler than usual was more than enough to make him visible.Police sirens could be heard a couple blocks down where a rundown hotel was located.

Before thinking, the first thing he did was rip off a piece of his shirt and press it against the source of the bleeding, noticing that the blood flow wasn’t that heavy. At this point he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. He knew Mello was conscious but other than a bitter smile from the blond the two didn’t talk. Matt felt like he would throw up if he opened his mouth.

Everything went by in a blur. All he remembered was going through his options as fast as he could, trying to choose the one with the least amount of risk. He decided against moving Mello. He had somehow managed to get a decent distance away from the crime scene and Matt knew moving him was a bad idea. Plus, the lack of blood surrounding Mello in a different location would be suspicious, especially when there was so much over here.

‘Screw it,’ Matt thought. He was running out of time. He grabbed for Mello’s phone and dialed an ambulance. The moment the operator picked up Matt was a mess.

He ignored the lady’s requests to stay calm but did his best to answer her questions. Tears ran freely down his cheeks and dripped from his chin as he looked at his friend who was simply looking at him with half open eyes.  
He didn’t remember much after that. He held Mello’s hand, noting in the back of his head that the fact that they were gloved would probably prove helpful. Later Mello would tell him he was mumbling incoherent jumbled of empty words and unsure promises. That Mello wanted to lean forward and shut him up if he could have.

The ambulance picked them up and Mello was rushed into the hospital. Matt was grateful that no one asked him any questions for the moment, deciding not to distress the adolescence any further. It gave him enough time to come up with a story.

When they did ask Matt remembered his voice coming out raspy, like he hadn’t had water for days. “Called me in the middle of the night, said he thought someone was following him. Asked me to stay on the phone with him. Heard a gunshot. Thought it was a prank at first. Went to check it out. Found him. Called.” The investigators nodded, and Matt was glad to have the excuse of being too worried to say much. He stayed with Mello 24/7, making sure he was in the room the second he woke up.

When Mello finally opened his eyes and proved himself capable of understanding his surroundings, Matt didn’t waste a second in explaining what the story was.

“You were on your way back from a club. You saw someone dressed in all black following you so you called me. You walked into an alleyway to see if you could hide from him. He shot you and ran away. If they ask whether you saw his face just mention something vague. You couldn’t see him well because it was dark. Got it?”

Mello nodded.

Matt visited everyday, basically spending all of his time in the hospital. Mello scolded him a couple times, telling him that they couldn’t afford for the both of them to not be working at the same time. Matt had rolled his eyes and continued playing on his DS, but Mello had noticed the hours on his visits decreased slightly after.

“You should have told me, you know.” Mello looked up at Matt, who was fiddling with the gloves on his hand that Mello was pretty sure didn’t belong to him.

“Should have told you what?” He asked, although the discomfort in his voice made it clear he had a pretty good idea. Matt liked that he could tell. Mello was pretty good at keeping his emotions in check. 

"That you were having thoughts like that. I could’ve helped you." he paused, his eyes running over Mello. His hair had grown out now, no longer curling out at the sides. It gave him a harder look. Mello looked more like the man his personality had grown into years ago. 

"Didn’t need help." Mello mumbled, grabbing for the leftover piece of chocolate next to him. 

"Bullshit," Matt’s voice was firm, but gentle. "You needed help and there’s literally nothing you can do to cover that up." 

The both of them stayed silent, unsure of what to say to the other. 

Matt cleared his throat. “You know.” he paused again, looking as though he wanted to take his words back before he had even said them. “We’re gonna have to find a way to pay for all of this.” He gestured to the room around them. The both of them seemed to stand out from the white, pristine walls of the hospital. There was something off, something unnatural about them being in such a clean, organized setting. 

"I’ll get another job," Mello chimed in immediately. The guilt seeped into his voice. "I’ll find three if I have to. I’ll do whatever it takes, I promise."

Matt waved him away, taking his goggles into his hands and twisting them. “I was thinking of a change in profession, honestly. Hacking’s a bit boring. Now  _cracking._ That sounds like a job offer I’d like to take.” 

Mello stared at him with an open mouth. “But I—I thought you—”

Matt shrugged. “I guess it’s time for a change of pace. We need the money, and I can’t let you do this alone.” His lips stretched out into a grin. “Who knows, maybe one day you’ll go down in history. Mello, the ruthless leader of the Mafia.”

 


End file.
